By now, stories about all manner of COVID-related disruptions in the arts and entertainment world are familiar, but few are as dramatic and ultimately triumphant as this one. Portland filmmaker Rose Bond, an esteemed presence in the city’s globally recognized animation community, was commissioned to create an original piece to accompany a performance by the Oregon Symphony. The work’s premiere was scheduled for March 15, 2020, so when public activities were curtailed by the rapidly spreading pandemic, it was unclear whether it would ever see the light of day.

Fast forward to earlier this month during the Venice Film Festival, as the ten-minute, hand-drawn 1968 finally had its public debut, and in a form that had evolved into a display of technological marvels. Viewers sit inside the frame of a geodesic dome 11 meters in diameter that’s studded with fifteen speakers (and includes a smoke machine), wearing VR headsets but engaging in a shared experience thanks to a “spatial audio” presentation of composer inti figgis-vizueta’s score as performed by the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet and “spatialized” by sound designer Massimiliano Borghesi. The result, per the film’s press kit, is “a full sphere of sound” that “evokes sound holograms in every seat.”

Unfortunately, Oregon Arts Watch’s travel budget did not allow me to attend the Venice premiere, although even if I had, the experience may not have translated easily into words. (Watching 1968, a visual collage inspired by the tumultuous events of that year, on a 2D computer screen is like drinking fine wine with your nostrils pinched: it’s possible to imagine a rich sensory experience, but impossible to even remotely appreciate it in full.) I was, however, able to speak with Bond while she was in Venice to learn more about this ambitious project and its long and winding road to existence. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Oregon ArtsWatch: Why is the year 1968 so resonant to you, and was there a single moment or image that inspired the film?

Rose Bond: 1968 was a year that was significant for me. It was a year that was punctuated by social, political, and cultural turmoil. This was not just in Portland, at Portland State University. It was also in Paris. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. In May, Paris erupted in people on the streets, starting with students but then labor joined them. Two million people in the streets. In June, Robert F. Kennedy, the good one, was assassinated in Los Angeles. In July, San Francisco exploded with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And all through the fall, across America, campuses erupted in protests. Younger people respond to [the film]. I’m surprised by that, but they’re thinking about their father or their grandparents, whether they were in Italy or Czechoslovakia or China; this was a worldwide event. One guy from France really summed it up. In the piece, there’s some graffiti from Paris, something the situationists used as a slogan: “It is forbidden to forbid.”

OAW: This was Guy Debord and that crowd?

RB: Yeah, exactly. This French guy, after seeing the piece, he said that phrase was so important. He said that his was the first generation to come of age after World War II. They’d been through the 1950s and taught that this is the way life is: a mom, a dad, the dad worked, and they had two or three kids, and everything was set. Boys had short hair; girls wore dresses. And they were the first generation to say, “No. We want this.” Of course, the foundation was laid by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. But why did that idea come to me? It was because I was commissioned by the Oregon Symphony to do a piece. Back in 2015, I did a piece with them based on Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. It was projected on the walls of the Schnitzer and I played live like a veejay, with a live orchestra. I prepared all these clips, over a hundred of varying length, because I didn’t know how long it would be, or how fast. The piece itself is a difficult one for a lot of people. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but the art director said that the walkout rate for Messiaen was usually around 40%, but in the hall that night, with like 1500 to 1800 in the audience over three performances, he said he counted twelve people that left.

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OAW: It’s nice to know that they weren’t too challenged by the aesthetic originality of the experience. Symphony audiences are known to be fairly conservative that way.

RB: It also drew in another audience. Two years later, the symphony came to me and said they wanted to do it again and asked me what I’d like to do. I’m not a classical music person, but I knew some people, and one of the composers they recommended was Luciano Berio, this Italian guy who was living in New York in the 1960s and tinkering around with electronic music. He was doing what we’d call sampling but that he called “coding,” lifting pieces of music from Mahler, Debussy, whoever, but also including spoken-word and other stuff. I got ahold of a CD from the Seattle Symphony with a recording of his piece Sinfonia with [the vocal octet] Roomful of Teeth.

OAW: So, it started with that piece of music, and you went from there.

RB: When I heard it, I thought it was impossible to visualize or illustrate, especially Movement Three, which was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want it to be anybody’s soundtrack, and I didn’t want to just be visual wallpaper for some music thing.

OAW: You really set yourself a challenge.

RB: It brought out the best, I think, work of my life, and two days before it was going to open, the governor closed everything down, so it was cancelled.

OAW: It’s interesting to me that the film evokes a time of turmoil, of movements for social change, of demonstrations in the streets, so vividly that one might think it was inspired by that COVID summer of 2020. That year feels in some ways like the closest recent analogue to 1968, and yet the film 1968 was conceived years earlier. Does that strike you as well?

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RB: I totally agree, and that’s becoming more evident as we premiere the piece and get responses. I think, though, that what differentiates then from now is that when we were young, we had optimism, and it’s really hard for this generation that’s saddled with student debt, unable to buy a home, and stuck in these individual bubbles to have that. It became really important to me to do a VR piece that didn’t play into that individual isolation thing. So, the idea of creating a spatialized sound and creating an environment that was communally shared was critical to the piece.

OAW: Are you aware of any other pieces or installations that have attempted to replicate that VR experience but in an open, if contained, environment? Is this the first of its kind?

RB: I don’t know about that, but I know that the spatial sound people I work with here in Venice, Studio PASE, they have one of four systems in Europe to test this stuff. So, it’s relatively new, but you can see the interest shifting, maybe since the Sphere opened. The spatialized sound makes Dolby and all that just seem—I don’t want to dis that because I love going to movies, I love being in a movie theater, but I also love this opportunity to create this kind of cognitive, emotional message without dialogue, without words, with these fragments of animated black-and-white photographs.

OAW: In a way it harks back to the earliest days of cinema where there wasn’t spoken dialogue, and it was a much more universal, immersive experience. You didn’t always have to speak a certain language or have a certain cultural knowledge or background.

RB: With my background in experimental animation, all that goes back as well to the 1950s, when [the] Annecy [Animation Festival] broke away from Cannes and Eastern European animators used so-called children’s fare to get their messages out.

OAW: Are there plans to screen, if that’s the right word, 1968, in Portland as originally envisioned? What sort of venues would be appropriate for that?

RB: All I can say is that there’s a whole lot of interest right now. The piece will be in Prague in October, where they have a new planetarium with an LED screen and, I hear, an amazing sound system. So, in answer to your question, I don’t know about Portland. There are some conversations going on, but it takes a little dough and to be frank with you it’s a little bit hard right now in the USA and this piece has some political content.

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OAW: Would something like the Kendall Planetarium at OMSI work?

RB: It’s in the same ballpark. I’m kind of a snob because I’ve done so many projection works since my first one in Old Town Portland in 2000. I’ve worked with the best projectionist guy in Portland—he does stuff for Nike. And if your projector doesn’t have enough lumens or if it’s too old, everything looks like a mashed potato to me. And I’m not going to show my work unless the tech is up there, you know?

OAW: This was clearly a collaborative effort, including Zak Margolis, who’s credited as Art Director and was one of the six animators, including you, featured in the 2023 documentary History, Mystery, and Odyssey. Can you talk about that team and how it came together?

RB: I participated in the Venice Biennale College Cinema, which is a residency program you apply for. To apply, you need a producer, so I went to Melanie Coombs, who was a producer on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinnochio at ShadowMachine. Things were slow for her, so she said she’d go with me. We turned up in Venice for this 10-day College in January 2024. And by May, I had taken Earths to Come, which is a tri-screen projection meant to be played live with the group Roomful of Teeth and made it into a communal VR experience. The person who hooked me up with the spatial sound for that was Giacomo, one of the College tutors. He knows the Italians, including this guy Max, who’s mixing some of the most interesting, experimental sound work in Europe. And he happened to live down the road in Trieste and he knew Victor and Valeria from PASE, who have a studio here with all the toys. So, it was just like one little paving stone falling after another to where we had this international team. But really the core of it is me and Zak in Portland.

OAW: And that doesn’t even include the folks who created the score.

RB: I was also meeting all these music people through inti. The group doing the music for 1968 is the Attacca Quartet, which has two Grammys. And last year in Venice, which I didn’t know until a week ago, they won the award at the Biennale Music for the best performance.

OAW: I wish I’d been able to experience it. Can you describe what it’s like?

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RB: You really can’t describe it because it’s a body feeling with those twenty speakers around you. It’s like being in the woods, or somewhere you can actually hear. There’s something about headphone sounds that is engineered to sort of fake you out, but this is just a full 360. It opens up these whole new possibilities. As a person who comes from cinema, I’m a bit of an odd duck in the VR world because a lot of them come from gaming or from documentary or programming. They sometimes think of animation as a step in a process, something from a program. There’s not always that human, expressive gesture of drawing at the core.